by alter-ego » Sun Jul 12, 2015 6:17 am
Jim Leff wrote:How did they achieve the launch speed? Was the rocket stocked with extra fuel, or was it a light load, or....?
It wasn't a particularly novel rocket, I don't believe....
Scientific American wrote: We can start off easy though. Launch velocity is something very definite, tuned to the finest level possible in order to insert a mission into its optimal trajectory. The record holder is also easy to find, it's the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt.
Launched by NASA in 2006,
it shot directly to a solar system escape velocity. This consisted of an Earth-relative launch of 16.26 kilometers a second (that's about 36,000 miles per hour), plus a velocity component from Earth's orbital motion (which is 30 km/s tangential to the orbital path). Altogether this set New Horizons barreling off into the solar system with an impressive heliocentric speed of almost 45 km/s or 100,000 miles per hour.
The Sun's pull is relentless though, so sometimes you need a helping hand. In 2007 New Horizons had slowed to about 19 km/s and made a flyby of Jupiter to snag a gravity assist (where the spacecraft 'stole' a tiny bit of Jupiter's momentum) in order to regain about 4 km/s - before settling in for the long coast outwards. In the first figure shown here you can see how this is going to play out - heliocentric velocity is going to slowly drop during the journey through the Sun's ever weakening gravity field. However, when it encounters Pluto, the spacecraft will still whizz by at about 14 km/s relative velocity.
Of course the Atlas V (see link) is a heavy-lift launch platform - it was, and possibly still is, in 2nd place to the Saturn V.
You might find the SA article interesting. It's titled:
The Fastest Spacecraft Ever?[quote="Jim Leff"]How did they achieve the launch speed? Was the rocket stocked with extra fuel, or was it a light load, or....?
It wasn't a particularly novel rocket, I don't believe....[/quote]
[quote="[url=http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-fastest-spacecraft-ever/]Scientific American[/url]"] We can start off easy though. Launch velocity is something very definite, tuned to the finest level possible in order to insert a mission into its optimal trajectory. The record holder is also easy to find, it's the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt.
Launched by NASA in 2006, [color=#0000FF]it shot directly to a solar system escape velocity[/color]. This consisted of an Earth-relative launch of 16.26 kilometers a second (that's about 36,000 miles per hour), plus a velocity component from Earth's orbital motion (which is 30 km/s tangential to the orbital path). Altogether this set New Horizons barreling off into the solar system with an impressive heliocentric speed of almost 45 km/s or 100,000 miles per hour.
The Sun's pull is relentless though, so sometimes you need a helping hand. In 2007 New Horizons had slowed to about 19 km/s and made a flyby of Jupiter to snag a gravity assist (where the spacecraft 'stole' a tiny bit of Jupiter's momentum) in order to regain about 4 km/s - before settling in for the long coast outwards. In the first figure shown here you can see how this is going to play out - heliocentric velocity is going to slowly drop during the journey through the Sun's ever weakening gravity field. However, when it encounters Pluto, the spacecraft will still whizz by at about 14 km/s relative velocity.
[/quote]
Of course the Atlas V (see link) is a heavy-lift launch platform - it was, and possibly still is, in 2nd place to the Saturn V.
You might find the SA article interesting. It's titled: [i]The Fastest Spacecraft Ever?[/i]